Alas, Christmas day was so near I could not celebrate my festival on that day; but another day might find us just as happy; and after all it would be "curdling" too much joy into one of the shortest of our days.

It was rich and smooth and Rosemary felt that when the time came to ladle it into the cups she would have every right to be proud of her ability, for she alone had made the soup, the other girls fearing the mysterious "curdling" that sometimes spoiled their product.

A keenly observant writer, he turns his story into an amusingly bleak X-ray of present-day Korea, whose people are as interested in Bart Simpson as Kim Jong Il. Along the way, we meet a huge array of sharply drawn social types - comedians and tax cheats, porn addicts and schoolteachers, spoiled college kids and former student radicals like Ma-ri, who find their generational dreams of national reunification curdling into desperate adulteries.